This site is built around the history of three families whose family names were Cassirer, Cohen and Falk. When I embarked on putting this information on the web it was with the idea that if I found it interesting it might be of interest also to my relatives. I also hoped that improving it could become a collective exercise. And so it has, benefiting enormously from information, photographs and corrections from an increasingly large number of contributors.

One attraction of the idea of a collective history is the possibility that by accessing it we can better understand why we came to be where we are. For the families here this understanding has been disrupted by emigration, the holocaust, expansion of empire, and much else. But it is precisely because of the severity of that disruption that helping bridge it seems worthwhile. From my point of view the impetus to explore this history was in part to gain a clearer picture of the Cassirer and Falk sides of the family, which seemed to me so mysterious, because the knowledge of it departed with my father and his mother, Betty Falk (ne Betty Cassirer), in 1957 when I was eleven years old.